CAPS off to SeeBeyond

A little less than a month ago, Sun did a European tour to explain to its customers and partners what had been achieved since the SeeBeyond acquisition in the summer of 2005. You can read and listen about the SOA strategy and product details here (4 audio+slides presentations):

(although, knowing Mark Bauhaus, our Senior VP for Business Integration, Application Platform, and Identity Management Software, this is not him speaking for the Sun Software Strategy talk. Too much of a Brit accent there ;-)

In a nutshell, what I got out of this is that:

– The little overlap between Sun and SeeBeyond products allowed the teams to work very fast and come up with a combined product – Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS). Version 5.1 now comes with Sun’s Application Server (actually, this is something that was decided before the acquisition, and there are 3 other AppServers supported) and Sun Portal Server.

– Sun is expanding the number of supported platform.

– Sun is integrating CAPS into Java ES and will offer per-employee pricing.

– Both on the tools and runtime side, offerings target Process-driven visual development (the traditionnal SeeBeyond approach), but now also profesionnal Java developers (with standards such as Java EE, Web Services and JBI). In particular, the ESB Suite (not yet available) is a subset of the CAPS offering based on the OpenESB open source developments. On the tools side, the NetBeans Enterprise Pack needs another iteration before it uses the SeeBeyond BPEL engine, but things are coming together nicely.